How Not To Focus on Customer Acquisition: MyFitnessPal

By not focusing on customer acquisition, actually helps MyFitnessPal to go out of their box. MyFitnessPal believes that marketing is not about customer acquisition and targeting specific channels only, instead its strategy needs to focus on users throughout end-to-end customer journey and across all channels. This concept has been seen as an out-of-the-box concept compared to that of traditional marketing.

MyFitnessPal App snapshots (Source: Marketingland.com)

MyFitnessPal is a customer of Marketo, and part of Under Armour Connected Fitness, has now become the world’s most sought after nutrition tracking app and healthy living platform. MyFitnessPal has more than 80 million unique customers worldwide.

New vs Existing Customers

As there are million apps in the digital store nowadays, it is not easy to compete, acquire users, not to mention to have user engagements, especially when it comes to mobile application whereby user needs to download the app before being able to use them. Moreover, businesses are advised not to use mobile app as a tool of acquiring new customers, but should be used as a tool to improve loyalty and target existing customers.

Acquisition vs Engagement

To MyFitnessPal, marketing should be geared towards all aspects of customer relationship, not only be used as a framework for customer acquisition. Marketers should ask themselves these questions – what will happen after acquisition? How to create and improve engagement? How to attract users to use the app more often?

Everywhere Channel

In the world of micro seconds, people have little attention span, especially with the growth of digital media / social media, it is getting more difficult for users to engage (not to mention, with so many other alternatives available). Due to this reason, MyFitnessPal realized that they needed to engage their users “everywhere”. That means shifting their focus from mobile only communication to engage users across different channels.

Also, by utilising marketing automation technology, MyFitnessPal was able to broadcast tens of millions of emails to achieve such engagement. In addition, such technology allows retrieving users behaviours, interests, profiles from different channels; and allowing MyFitnessPal to create more opportunity. For instance, sending out chicken recipes to users who searched chicken dishes in the app.